Old English Sports eBook

I fear that our old writer must have made a great
mistake if he imagined that the Saxons ever played
cricket, and I believe that the word was not known
before the sixteenth century. In the records of
Guildford we find that a dispute arose about the enclosure
of a piece of land in the time of Elizabeth; and in
the suit that arose one John Derrick stated in his
evidence that he knew the place well “for fifty
years or more, and that when he was a scholar in the
free school at Guildford he and several of his companions
did run and play there at cricket and other plays.”
Also in Cotgrave’s French Dictionary, published
in 1611, the word crosse is translated “a
cricket-staff, or the crooked-staff wherewith boys
play at cricket.”

In the eighteenth century allusions to the game become
more frequent, although it was still a boy’s
game. It had its poet, who sang—­

“Hail, cricket, glorious,
manly, British game,
First of all sports,
be first alike in fame.”

It had its calumniators, who said that it “propagated
a spirit of idleness” in bad times, when people
ought to work and not play, and that it encouraged
gambling. But the game began to prosper, and
several noted men, poets and illustrious statesmen,
recall the pleasurable memories of their prowess with
the bat and ball. In a book of songs called Pills
to purge Melancholy, published in 1719, we find
the verse—­

“He was the prettiest
fellow
At football or at cricket:
At hunting chase or
nimble race
How featly he could
prick it.”

In the early part of the eighteenth century the game
was in a very rudimentary condition, very different
from the scientific pastime it has since become.
There were only two wickets, a foot high and two feet
apart, with one long bail at the top. Between
the wickets there was a hole large enough to contain
the ball, and when the batsman made a run, he had
to place the end of his bat in this hole before the
wicket-keeper could place the ball there, otherwise
he would be “run out.”

The bat, too, was a curved, crooked arrangement very
different from our present weapon. The Hambledon
Club, in Hampshire, which has produced some famous
players, seems to have been mainly instrumental in
reforming and improving the game. Its members
introduced a limit to the width of the bat, viz.,
four and a quarter inches—­the standard
still in force—­in order to prevent players,
such as a hero from Reigate, bringing bats as wide
as the wicket. In 1775 they wisely introduced
a middle stump, as they found the best balls harmlessly
flying between the wide wickets. It was feared
lest this alteration would shorten the game too much,
but it does not seem to have had that effect, as in
an All England match against the Hambledon Club, two
years later, one Aylward scored 167 runs, and stayed
in two whole days. England owes much to the old
Club at Hambledon for the improvements which it wrought
in the game, which has become our great national pastime.